We had the privilege of Brian Aker Director of Architecture for MySQL speaking at the Brisbane MySQL Users Group this week (28 ^th Jan 2006). After the initial discussions on various topics, Brian got into his discussion on MySQL 5.1. I was surprised that only 2 people (myself being one of them) had 5.1 installed and being used in any way.

Here were some of the highlights of the talk. Should have taken some more notes.

MySQL 5.1 Features

Partitioning Will include Range, Hash, List and Key handling and Subpartitioning. Documentation · Forum.
Partitioning is a table structure syntax. No changes to any SQL statements are required to use partitioning within your application.

Log Tables Log files can be stored within the database. Error log will definitely not be available. Official information is sketchy.
The 5.1.6 Release notes indicate mysqld -both-log-formats and –old-log-format arguments (as of 5.1.6), but nothing yet in the The MySQL Log Files Documentation

Fast Alter Table To speed up Alter Table for example extending a VARCHAR column, only the tables .frm is rewritten, and no adjustment to table rows is required.

Replication Documentation

• Row Based Replication (RBR) (5.1.5) Documentation

mysqld arguments –binlog-format and –binlog-row-event-max-size

• Support for Cluster (NDB)
• GUID’s support

There was a good discussion on Master/Master including comparision to PostgreSQL. This could be achieved now using triggers and federated tables, or UDF’s. Planned in 5.2 is a Conflict Resolution implementation via use of Stored Procedures, which will be a pre-requisite before any MySQL multi-master implementation.

Federated Documentation · Forum

• Transaction Support (still with some rollback issues) Note: Documentation still lists this as a limitation
• 5.2 will provide full XA support

XML Parsing Support (5.1.5) Article
Provides support for XPath expressions in XML content stored in a database column.

Events (5.1.6 – not yet available) Article

There was a strong discussion on occurance management of events. Obviously the ability not to have cron jobs, username/passwords etc is great, but with most scripts there is always an amount of locking management (either via filesystem or database). I think we may have convinced Brian to consider a event syntax extension that would ensure that only one instance of a given event can run at any one time. As events are seperate threads it’s important that for frequently run events, there is appropiate management to ensure re-occuring events don’t back up. My opinion is for a syntax to run only one instance of the event (e.g. SINGLE INSTANCE, SINGLE OCCURANCE) We could have recommended BRISBANE as the syntax extension, however I doubt it would be considered standard.

Also discussed was appropiate TimeZone management, particularly to ensure events scheduled appropiately across databases managed globally.

Loadable Engines
This feature may be deferred to 5.2 to have a full feature. The goal of Loadable engines allows for no need to recompile MySQL from source, of even restart an instance for any change to the engine. I’m sure internally the one reason why this is important is to allow ease of testing when writing a new storage engine. Documentation – Writing a Custom Storage Engine · Article

Cluster improvements (NDB) Documentation · RoadMap

• replication works with cluster
• storage on disk based records, not limited to RAM
• indexes still remain in RAM

Benchmarking Tool mysqlslap (5.1.4) Documentation.
The list of options looks impressive, and since my 5.1 version is 5.1.4 I’ll be playing some more here.

Archive Storage Engine Documentation · Forum

• auto increment support (5.1.6)
• Blob Speed Improvements

Instance Manager
Available in 5.0, but being better published in 5.1 is an Instance Manager allowing change of configuration/startup/shutdown etc. Documentation

Distribution Names
As part of 5.1, the use of -standard and -max versions will be eliminated. Brian mentioned he had lost count answering the question of the difference between -max and maxDB. As at 5.1.4 (what I have) the filenames still include -max, but we were assured this would be dropped.

INFORMATION_SCHEMA
Of course as part of these changes, there will be a number of new tables in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA including ENGINES (5.1.5), PLUGINS (5.1.5), PARTITIONS (5.1.6), EVENTS (5.1.6).
Of note, there is a FILES (5.1.6) for the storage of table information?

Other References
What’s New in MySQL 5.1 MySQL Change History for Version 5.1

Future Directions for MySQL

• This year will also be a GUI Enterprise Manager for the community edition
• FULLTEXT for other storage engines
• More Transaction Engines
• Federate Tables to non MySQL tables via JDBC
• FULLTEXT loadable parser written in C
• Alternative stored procedure languages
• Replication Conflict Resolution Management by user definable stored procedures
• myforge – A soureforge/freshmeat like open source system for MySQL projects

Other Discussions

There were a number of post talk discussions. Those of interest to me included running other languages in stored procedures (myPerl/myPhp user contributions available at Brian’s open source site www.tangent.org), increasing exposure to ISP’s to offer hosting with MySQL 5.0, including best practice guidelines, and of most discussion Asterisk The Open Source PBX.